the avant-garde in pop music, part 1

were the early 1970's a heyday?

Welcome back to The Non-Writer! Since my last post, I’ve been receiving a steady stream of new subscribers. I’m not sure how you’re finding this, but I’m glad you’re here. Thank you to all subscribers to The Non-Writer. I do appreciate it.

Also, a quick note about video. I continue to enjoy working with video, and substack is starting to offer more video tools for watching, sharing and creating video on the platform. I’ve invested a lot of time this year learning to use a powerful editor and I’ve been posting my work at The Non-Writer YouTube channel. Some of that will start showing up here on substack. So far, most of the work has been short videos of live shows where I try to give a taste not only for the performance, but also the audience and the venue. You can check it out here:

The Non-Writer: live shows

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Now, on to our story…

In my interview with Chris Cutler published last March, he made an observation about avant-garde music being more accepted by the pop music audience during a brief window of time hovering around the early 1970’s. He talked about how Virgin Records got started by exploiting this niche in popular music taste. And of course he found himself smack-dab in the middle of all this when his band Henry Cow signed with Virgin in May of 1973.

Avant-garde music has always seemed like the antithesis of pop music, so this idea that it was part of pop music fascinated me. Maybe that’s because 1970 is about the time when I started forming my own musical taste and identity. The notion that the avant-garde had anything to do with the popular music I was listening to was not only over my head, but unimportant to me at the time.

As I started uncovering the details of that music for this story, I found myself often referring to my record collection, and I began to wonder about the bigger picture. What led up to this? What was considered popular or avant-garde music in the prior decades?

I’m no musical scholar. At best I’m an armchair historian with a record collection. At worst I’m just another blogger with an opinion. I’m counting on you to correct me when I’m wrong and share your own knowledge where I’ve left gaps. This is a big topic and I’m not shooting for complete coverage. It’s highlights from my own experience listening to music. As you read this story and think about your own highlights, please share them with us in the comments.

My knowledge of popular music history peters out the closer you get to about 1900. A few decades ago I went through a phase where I was loving marching band music. I learned then that composer and conductor John Philip Souza (1854-1932) was the Michael Jackson of his day. In 1900 the selling of recorded music was in its infancy, so he made his money as most musicians always have … by touring the world, and in his case to massive crowds.

Funny enough, selling recorded music would soon take off and Souza did not approve, calling it “canned music”. He used his popularity to testify against recorded music before Congress in 1906, stating:

“These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy… in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.”

By 1914 Souza was a founder of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and was active in advocating for royalty rights for composers, lyricists, and publishers. Recording technology would improve from the sound of “canned music”, and by 1925 Souza had softened his position on what were now called phonograph records.

During Souza’s early years, blues and jazz might have been considered the avant-garde music of the day. This music would not become as popular as Souza’s until it morphed into the “big band” sound and started to fill event venues with an enthusiastic dancing public. Dancing would remain the centerpiece of popular music for decades.

To find an identifiable leading figure in the avant-garde music world during Souza’s time, we have to wait until the 29th of May 1913 when a classical music audience in Paris was upset by the debut performance of Igor Stravinsky’s (1882-1971) The Rite of Spring. A disturbance, some would later call it a riot, occurred during the first half of the performance. Since this was a ballet, it’s not entirely clear if the unrest was due mainly to the music or the dancing, or both. What is clear is that those in attendance at such shows consisted primarily of two groups: the wealthy and the “bohemians”. Their distaste for each other apparently spilled out of control that night. About 40 people were ejected and the second half of the performance went on without incident. Stravinsky and all involved got a standing O and the avant-garde Rite of Spring would go on to influence music to this day.

Soon after, the world of the avant-garde was about to get another moment in the spotlight. Spurred on by the cultural upheaval of WWI, artists around the world intent on smashing the status quo found an identity and called it Dada. The exact origins of this movement may be up for debate, but we can pinpoint a defining moment on the 5th of February 1916 when Hugo Ball (1886-1927) founded the venue Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland. All forms of avant-garde performance were presented, the more outlandish the better.

The venue would only last about 6 months, but Dada would continue to be a major influence on “new music” composers for over a decade, including John Cage (1912-1992), Erik Satie (1866-1925), Edgard Varèse (1883-1965), and a young American named George Antheil (1900-1959) who by the end of WWII would become the self-proclaimed “bad boy of music”.

Antheil went to Europe hoping to meet Stravinsky, possibly to learn how to make compositions that would cause riots. Antheil loved riots, and sure enough he got’m. After he realized that riots were causing people to depart early and not hear his music, he decided to change tactics. On at least one occasion, he called for the concert hall doors to be locked, brandished a pistol, laid it on top of the piano and began his performance. In his 1945 autobiography he claims, “Every note was heard…”.

John Cage on the other hand may not have been so interested in having the audience hear every note. In 1952 he premiered his work 4’ 33”, in which the musicians sat silent for the duration of the piece. The audience had to sit there too, and we all know how silent most audiences can be, hence the ambient noise in the performance space became the music. Were there riots? I don’t think so, but the audience was shocked nonetheless. Cage had started a conversation about “what is music” that goes on to this day.

By the middle of the 1950’s a culture war was heating up. A swelling population of youth were adopting rock & roll as their battle cry and challenging jazz for the crown of popular music. This war was quickly settled with the arrival of Chuck Berry and Elvis, among others, but was rock & roll to be short lived? A fad?

By 1959, a member of the youth movement who would make his own indelible mark on the sound of rock music, none other than Jeff Beck, was thinking to himself that “rock is dead”. “The lights went out” he said about the rapid decline in rock culture, which just five years prior seemed to dominate the musical landscape.  As I wrote in this story it's 1959 and rock'n'roll is dead, here is what lead him to his conclusion:

In 1957 Little Richard found god and renounced his evil ways to become a preacher.  That same year Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year-old cousin which did not go down well in the British press.  Then in 1959 one of the worst days in Beck’s life happened when Buddy Holly died in a plane crash along with Richie Valens, both rock icons to Jeff at the time.  Of the remaining icons, Elvis would be taken by the army in 1958 for a two year stint out of rebel rock action.  Then in late 1959 Chuck Berry would be arrested for taking a 14 year-old girl across state lines.  By 1960 Doris Day and Frank Sinatra were the icons that youth were instructed to follow. 

If rock was not to be the “new thing”, then what was? Jazz was still hanging in there as it morphed from the large big band ensembles to the more compact be-bop bands where the creative forces would shift the emphasis of the music toward improvisation. Much of the rest of the American pop music audience was now focusing on folk music with an emphasis on vocal harmonies. Meanwhile, in Great Britain, a fascination with American blues was developing into a full fledged movement where, once again, elements of improvisation were creeping into the music. The direction of popular music was about to be catapulted across the pond by the British Invasion.

It’s the 1960’s and all of the changes in the 20th century discussed so far are about to get accelerated. Avant-garde ideas and practices are not only being explored more by creative individuals, they are also being exposed more to the general public via ever expanding media, both mass and otherwise. Radio begat transistor-radio begat TV. 45 single records begat LP records begat 8-track tapes begat the compact cassettes.

One of the oddest introductions of the avant-garde to the masses happened in March of 1963 when a 22 year-old unknown Frank Zappa was an invited guest on the popular nationally syndicated TV program The Steve Allen Show. Allen was the original host of the late night talk show The Tonight Show in 1954. Nine years later, The Steve Allen Show was competing with new Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. Allen’s many talents included jazz composition. He had Frank on the show to demonstrate the use of a bicycle as a musical instrument. Zappa attempted to teach free improv not only to Allen on the bicycle, but also to the “man in the control booth” instructed to play blasts from the tape Zappa brought in, and the musicians in the house band asked to join in on their instruments “when they feel so moved to make any noise possible and refrain from musical tones”. Zappa would often sing the praises of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse, and he must have been thrilled to have this opportunity to emulate his mentor to such a wide audience; however he did not mention Varèse on this occasion.

Video: Frank Zappa teaches Steve Allen to play The Bicycle (1963)

Meanwhile, jazz audiences of the early 1960’s were beginning to get pushed to the outer limits of improvisation. Saxophonist Ornette Coleman showed up in NYC in the late 1950’s and started making waves with his new “free jazz” sound. Much of the jazz world didn’t know what to make of this music, with some even calling it a joke. Coleman signed on to the soon-to-be major record label, Atlantic, and he wanted to make his statement loud and clear, releasing albums entitled The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz (1961) among others.

By 1958 Atlantic, co-founded by Ahmet Ertegun in 1947, was America's second-largest independent jazz label. Ornette’s records on Atlantic, including Free Jazz, were produced by Ahmet’s brother Nesuhi Ertegun who was a partner by then in charge of A&R for jazz. The label would have major commercial success a decade later when Ahmet would release the first albums by Led Zeppelin and Yes, among many others.

In spite of how free jazz initially seemed to confound many jazz lovers, its influence would continue to spread. By 1965 John Coltrane created his free jazz epic album Ascension released in 1966. Miles Davis too was incorporating more free playing into his music which by the end of the decade he would use to propel jazz into yet another new direction with his album Bitches Brew in 1970.

If you want to know more about the early development of free jazz, I highly recommend the following short article written by Charles Waring in April of this year:

Free Jazz: A Short History Of The Jazz Sub-Genre by Charles Waring

The 1960’s would also see the crown of pop music indisputably bolted to the heads of 4 musicians playing rock & roll from England. The tidal wave of momentum that the Beatles created after their Ed Sullivan Show appearance on February 9 1964 would carry them until they broke up in 1970.

By 1967 when the band started work on their next album, they had become exposed to modern art and were keenly interested in avant-garde composers. Some of this interest came, no doubt, from their new friend Lucy (you know, the one in the Sky with Diamonds). Their experience represented a trend going on in the greater culture. A trend the authorities wanted to halt. California made LSD illegal in 1966, and by 1968 the entire country followed. Psychedelic rock however just kept on trending. Perhaps we can look at this album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, as the beginning of a new trend in the taste of popular music culture in general. A trend toward a desire to try new things. Could it be that pop music was beginning to be more accepting of the avant-garde?

Listen to what Paul McCartney has to say in this 2018 interview about his use of avant-garde ideas in recording the song “A Day in the Life”.

Paul McCartney Breaks Down His Most Iconic Songs

“… I’d been talking to people and reading about avant-garde music, atonal stuff, crazy ideas. And I came up with this idea …”

In my interview with Chris Cutler, he mentioned a trend happening in the club scene around 1966. Cutler noticed the audience behavior in the clubs shift from dancers to listeners. By 1967 he noted it was all listeners with few dancers as “more and more gigs had light shows and movie projections, and concerts moved toward being visual and immersive events.”

Other trends happening in music in the 60’s included a shift from the use of acoustic to electric instruments, with the sound of the guitar changing probably more than any other instrument in use at the beginning of the decade. The electronic music synthesizer was also becoming more affordable, moving from the world of academia to the live performance stage.

The mass culture was being severely impacted by more disturbing trends implying not just change but impending collapse. Was there ever a time in US history with more political assassinations over just a few short years? A time of more deadly riots over war and social injustice?

And the space race is going on too! A human would be walking on the moon in 1969.

There was a book written in 1970 that tried to sum up the zeitgeist of the time. It was written by futurist Alvin Toffler and called Future Shock. The author said the meaning of the title is when people feel “too much change in too short a period of time".

As a young person (I was just entering my teenage years) I found this rapid change exciting. My favorite television show was Star Trek, and I couldn’t wait to one day commute in my flying car and take vacations on Mars. Still waiting.

In 1968, the Beatles continued to pursue the avant-garde with their album simply called The Beatles, better known as the White Album. By this time John Lennon’s girlfriend Yoko Ono had begun to influence Lennon’s songwriting with ideas she learned from the experimental Fluxus art community. She made a significant contribution to the song "Revolution 9", a sound collage that could rightly be called the most avant-garde song on any pop album up to that time, let alone any album by the Beatles.

Is the door cracking open in the pop music world to let the avant-garde step fully in?

1968 is also the year we began to see the most popular movies of the day showcase soundtracks that feature heavy use of avant-garde music.

In the spring of 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. While the story may have been pretty standard science fiction fare, at least to this young sci-fi fan, it was the music of György Ligeti that made this trip to Jupiter an avant-garde tour de force. Although Ligeti seemed to enjoy the use of his music in the film, he probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if director Stanley Kubrick had ASKED him first. Apparently Kubrick’s renowned attention to detail lapsed when it came to obtaining the rights to the music. Nevertheless, the avant-garde had snuck into popular culture again.

Kubrick’s realistic vision presented on a giant screen of a trip through the solar system made the whole thing seem attainable to me. But as the movie climaxed, the nuts and bolts of space travel morphed into a psychedelic experience for the audience. The visuals had caught up to the music, and I was more than relieved upon exiting the theater to see that the adults around me were scratching their heads too.

Back in reality, 1968 was one of the bloodiest periods of social unrest in American history. My youthful dreams may have been flying high in space, but the peace & love generation that launched at the start of the decade was burning out fast — a combination of self-immolation and the hammer of authority coming down hard.

By 1971 the mood of popular films had changed, but avant-garde soundtracks were still present.

The 1971 film that won 5 Academy Awards including being the first ‘R’ rated movie to win Best Picture was The French Connection directed by William Friedkin. Wikipedia says The French Connection was the 4th highest-grossing American film of 1971. A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show were number 7 and 8. And the number one money making film of 1971 was ……………………. Billy Jack.

Friedkin appears to have had great taste in eclectic music. He also liked to take chances. For The French Connection, along with shooting one of the wildest car chase scenes in cinema history in the middle of NYC (at times with no traffic control), he also hired jazz composer and trumpet player Don Ellis. Ellis had made a name for himself in the avant-garde jazz scene of NYC in the 1960’s. This would be his second film score, his first appearing in the cheesy 1969 sci-fi movie Moon Zero Two produced by the iconic British horror film company Hammer Films. An interesting side note here is that the theme song for this movie was sung by Julie Driscoll (a protégé of Yardbird producer Giorgio Gomelsky) who would later work with and marry avant-jazz pianist Keith Tippett.

Gritty is an overused, yet apt, term applied to The French Connection, which may just be the first popular gritty film made in America thanks to Friedkin’s experience as a documentary filmmaker. To punch home the realism of the film he wanted an atmospheric score, not a musical one. In interviews, Friedkin expressed fond memories of working with Ellis and a bit of dismay that of the 8 Academy Award nominations the film got, none was for the music.

For a detailed breakdown on the making of the music, check out this short video:

Don Ellis: Cop Jazz - The Music of The French Connection (1971)

On Friedkin’s next film he would stick to his guns attempting to create another unusual soundtrack. However, with 1973’s The Exorcist, he would not have such fond memories of working with composers. It was the highest-grossing release of 1973 and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, winning two. It was the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture.

Bernard Herrmann was the first composer to agree to work with Friedkin on this project. Considered one of the greatest composers in the history of film, he’d scored films from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver, and also did the television theme for The Twilight Zone. The two men almost immediately had a falling out over Herrmann’s insistence on complete control of the soundtrack with no input allowed from Friedkin.

Next up was another experienced film composer Lalo Schifrin, whose credits up to that point included the theme from the tv show Mission: Impossible, as well as the scores to Bullitt (1968) and (my favorite sci-fi movie of all time) THX 1138 (1971). The latter is the first feature film by George Lucas which he created from an experimental film he won awards for in college. It’s hard to believe this is the same guy that would later give us Ewoks. Ugh.

Schifrin got further along in his collaboration with Friedkin than Herrmann did, but the end result was the same. Friedkin ultimately didn’t like what he got so he abandoned it all in favor of the classical music he had been using as a temporary soundtrack. This included modern classical pieces by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and Austrian composer Anton Webern, along with some brief original music by rock pianist Jack Nitzsche. All of this music amounted to only 17 minutes in the 2 hour long film. Friedkin was quoted as saying “The music is just a presence like a cold hand on the back of your neck, rather than assertive."

But Friedkin wasn’t done yet. He was still looking for some intro music that was like a lullaby with “a kind of childhood feel." He found it in the film studio’s music library.

This is the one piece of music from The Exorcist that any of us remember: Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. Even though the piece of music features dozens of instruments composed in two parts, each taking up an entire side of an album, Friedkin used only a brief part of the beginning featuring mostly piano. You hear it just a couple of times during the film. You have to wait for the end credits to hear more, including a few more of the instruments.

The Exorcist was released by Warner Bros. on December 26, 1973. When Friedkin first heard Tubular Bells while working on post-production for the film, the album had already been out for a few months having been released in the UK in May of 1973 and in North America in October. This was the first release by the newly formed label Virgin Records who sent it to Atlantic Records for American distribution.

Atlantic had been bought by Warner Bros. in 1967, and Warner Studios is where Friedkin was working on the film, so when he was sent to the Warner record library to find some music, Tubular Bells must have been near the top of the pile. Some reports have said it only had a white label when Friedken picked it out.

By that time hardly anyone in the USA had heard it. It took from May to July of 1973 for the album to show up on the UK Albums Chart where it peaked at number seven. After the movie came out in late December, the album would remain in the UK top ten for over a year, and in the music charts around the world for decades.

This one album can be credited with quite literally launching the career of Richard Branson whose fledgling label Virgin Records would help build the Virgin Group of companies, including Virgin Galactic which in 2021 launched Branson on a suborbital test flight to space.

According to Wikipedia, “Tubular Bells has sold more than 2.63 million copies in the UK, and an estimated 15 million worldwide. As of July 2016, it was the 42nd best-selling album of all time in the UK.”

But is it avant-garde?

To answer that, let’s have a look at how the piece was written.

Mike Oldfield began work on Tubular Bells in 1971 at the age of 19. As a young teenager he was a self-taught guitar player and an introvert, uncomfortable in social settings, preferring to spend time with his guitar. He was recognized as a prodigy early on and would soon be sought out by other musicians. By 1970 he was working with former Soft Machine vocalist Kevin Ayers on 3 albums in Abbey Road Studios. He put his studio time to good use learning all he could.

Also sometime in 1970, Oldfield took LSD for the first time. It was not a good trip for the introverted guitarist, causing him to retreat further into isolation with his music.

Working on his own with a tape recorder, he started turning his musical ideas into a demo tape. In many interviews Oldfield has mentioned two major influences on his writing style at that time: Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) and Keith Tippett’s Centipede Septober Energy (1971).

Here he talks about it again in this 2013 interview by Richard Buskin for soundonsound.com:

Classic Tracks: Mike Oldfield 'Tubular Bells'

"I was listening to a lot of classical music at that time, especially Bach, along with A Rainbow In Curved Air by Terry Riley,” Oldfield says, referring to a piece of music that saw the keyboardist and classical minimalist experiment with overdubbing techniques to play all of the instruments, including an organ, electronic harpsichord, tambourine and goblet drum. "I loved the repetitive two-part pattern that he played on both keyboards, one starting halfway through the other.”

"I wanted to create a long piece of instrumental music, because at that time there was a fantastic jazz orchestra called Centipede,” Oldfield explains. "Its leader was Keith Tippett, it contained the coolest, hippest musicians, and they'd play a long instrumental piece that, although it never translated well to disc [on 1971's Robert Fripp-produced Septober Energy double album], was absolutely superb when performed live. That was the biggest single inspiration: I wanted to make a piece of music like that, although maybe a bit more rocky and less jazzy.”

Oldfield’s connection to Riley’s minimalism is easy to hear in Tubular Bells. It’s more difficult to hear how the music of free jazz pianist Tippett came into the piece, other than both Tubular Bells and Septober Energy use a lot of instruments.

Minimalism as a compositional style was still in its early days, and having it appear in a popular film like The Exorcist might be considered a portent of its use in films to come. It would be about another decade when the rapidly rising star of minimalist composer Philip Glass would stake its claim to film score domination by writing the music for Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Today his music is so ubiquitous you can hardly watch a documentary film without hearing it.

Oldfield would not be nearly so prolific in the film score department, although pieces of Tubular Bells would continue to show up in many parts of the media landscape. I can find only two films and one documentary with music credited to Mike Oldfield. They include the 1974 French crime thriller, and by some accounts pornographic film, titled either Charlotte or The Murdered Young Girl by Roger Vadim (who also did 1968’s Barbarella); the 1979 NASA documentary The Space Movie; and the 1984 critically acclaimed British film The Killing Fields.

Keith Tippett had already worked on two King Crimson albums and would be on a third at the time of the release of Septober Energy. He was a session player for Crimson, refusing to join the band when asked. Oldfield too was a session player at this time, but it would be on the road and not in the studio that their paths would cross.

In 1970 Oldfield was touring with Ayers. After leaving Soft Machine, Ayers embarked on a solo recording career and assembled a band called The Whole World to tour his work . It was on this tour that Oldfield started hearing great things about Tippett’s large ensemble group Centipede featuring another Soft Machine founding member Robert Wyatt. On one occasion, The Whole World and Centipede ended up on the same bill, so Oldfield got to check them out up close. His reaction … “Amazing.”

It’s not clear if the young introvert Oldfield actually met Tippett during this time, but what is clear is that the seeds for Tubular Bells had been planted. Whatever you think of the results, there’s no denying the avant-garde building blocks Oldfield was using to create his project.

And not everyone was thrilled with the results.

The album was first released in the UK in May of 1973, and about 5 months later in the US. Keep in mind that it was the very first release of a brand new independent record label, Virgin.

The British music press and radio almost immediately loved this album. The well-known DJ John Peel started playing side one of the album in its entirety just 4 days after its release, calling it "one of the most impressive LPs I've ever had the chance to play on the radio…”.

Even Rolling Stone magazine in the US was calling it "the most important one-shot project of 1973".

However, a few months later a different reviewer in the same Rolling Stone referred to the record as "a clever novelty … cute in places, it probably makes pleasant background music for a dinner or conversation".

Even back in the UK, one critic in the publication Let It Rock compared Tubular Bells to attractive wall-paper, claiming it lacked energy.

And finally, in the magazine Creem in the US, critic Robert Christgau was less than flattering in his summation of the album, saying "The best I can come up with here is 'pleasant' and 'catchy'. Oldfield isn't Richard Strauss or even Leonard Cohen — this is a soundtrack because that's the level at which he operates."

I want to highlight Mr. Christgau’s comments here because he is going to play a role in part 2 of our story where I ask the question: was 1973 the peak of the avant-garde in pop music? And perhaps more specifically, was Tubular Bells a turning point?

In the meantime, let me leave you with this final detail. Mike Oldfield won the 1974 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018.